Hauntings

Book excerpt: What does life ask of us, and how are we to answer that summons? Are we here just to propagate the species anew? Do any of us really believe that we are here to make money and then die? Does life matter, in the end, and if so, how, and in what fashion? What guiding intelligence weaves the threads of our individual biographies? What hauntings of the invisible world invigorate, animate, and direct the multiple narratives of daily life? In Hauntings, James Hollis considers how we are all governed by the presence of invisible forms--spirits, ghosts, ancestral and parental influences, inner voices, dreams, impulses, untold stories, complexes, synchronicities, and mysteries--that move through us and through history. He offers a way to understand them psychologically, examining the persistence of the past in influencing our present, conscious lives and noting that engagement with mystery is what life asks of each of us. From such engagements, a deeper, more thoughtful, more considered life may come. "James Hollis is the most lucid thinker I know about the complexities and complexes that interfere with living a full life.... He is one of our great teachers and healers." --Stephen Dunn, Pulitzer Prize-winning poet